Batteries Pledge to Ransom Mosquitos from FBI

Let’s release GMO mosquitoes in Florida, give money to KUSP, beat a Go champion, encrypt every web server for free, and take care of your cell-phone battery.
KUSP’s new Interim General Manager Bonnie Jean Primbsch hosts, with Lyle Troxell, on a live pledge week episode. Discussion also include ransomware entering the Mac universe.

Let’s Encrypt has issued its millionth certificate. Our first million certificates are helping to secure approximately 2.4 million domains. This milestone means a lot to a team that started building a CA from scratch 16 months ago with an aim to have a real impact on the security of the Web as soon as possible.

When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee.

On March 4, we detected that the Transmission BitTorrent client installer for OS X was infected with ransomware, just a few hours after installers were initially posted. We have named this Ransomware “KeRanger.” The only previous ransomware for OS X we are aware of is FileCoder, discovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2014. As FileCoder was incomplete at the time of its discovery, we believe KeRanger is the first fully functional ransomware seen on the OS X platform.

According to researchers at anti-malware outfit Bitdefender, the recent KeRanger ransomware that was smuggled into the Transmission BitTorrent client earlier this week was actually a trivial rewrite of a similar Linux trojan called Linux.Encoder.

“Yesterday I was surprised, but today it’s more than that—I am quite speechless,” said Lee Se-dol at the post-game press conference. “I have to say, if you look at how the game was played, I admit that it was a very clear loss on my part. From the very beginning of the game … there was not a moment in time where I felt that that I was leading.”

Genetically engineered mosquitoes that have been under regulatory review for the past five years have passed one of the last remaining hurdles to gain approval for release in a field trial, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday.

In his keynote address at the 2016 South By Southwest conference, President Barack Obama responded directly to a question about cybersecurity in light of the ongoing Apple v. FBI case with answers that favored the American government’s current position. President Obama even called out Edward Snowden’s disclosure of classified documents in 2013.